Seminar explores how self-taught slaves found freedom through literacy

Among teachers and learners who met in March for the Adventures in Ideas seminar titled "Literacy
Unbound: Stories of'Self-taught' African-American
Slaves," the works discussed reverberated with irony
and inspiration.

Trudier Harris,]. Carlyle Sitterson professor and associate chair of English at UNC, addressed the problem
directly, telling the group: "We have come to a point at
which young black people have begtm to see literacy as
something they cannot claim - that which is white -
and so they reject it. This is an a-historical view with
no sense of the urgency ofliteracy in the past."

Weaving and overlapping in their sources and their
interpretations, Harris - along with UNC colleagues
Heather Williams, assistant professor of history, William
Andrews ' 70 (MA, ' 73 PhD), the E. Maynard Adams
professor of English and senior associate dean for fine
arts and humanities, and Randall Kenan ' 85, associate
professor of English - dug deep into the world of the
slave narrative, a world imbued with a desperate drive
for literacy.

Williams, who earned her doctorate after working for
10 years as a lawyer, laid the groundwork. She has used
her legal expertise as a wedge to open the story of the
official and unofficial oppression of slavery. Her research
found that most of the sources were written by white
abolitionists or missionaries who had made literacy
their priority. Frustrated, Williams wanted to know,
"Where are the voices of black people? Was literacy
something they also wanted?"

Some of the richest sources for Williams' answers are
slave narratives, stories that often turn on a pivot point
of literacy, stories in which African-Americans claim
education as a critical priority and a key to gaining
freedom. In them, former slaves talk about Pit Schools
(night meetings in pits originally dug to hide slaves on
the run during overnight stops at a plantation); Sundays,
when learning could be stolen under cover of travel to
church; bribes of candy and service to white children
who might sell a slave child the Blue Book Speller, and
white children tricked into being the teacher in a ganle
of playing school.

Andrews emphasized the credibility of Williams'
sources. "I have read and studied all 289 slave narratives,
and I see no evidence to undermine their claims to
authenticity;' he said. At the close of his own presenta-
tion,Andrews added emphatically that "the slave narra-
tive is the only truly indigenous North Anlerican nar-rative form."

Andrews' latest anthology, published by UNC Press,

William Andrews ' 70 (MA, ' 73 PhD), professor of English and senior associate
dean for fine arts and humanities, left, and Trudler Harris, professor and associate chair of English, discuss how African-American slaves empowered themselves with literacy and wrote for freedom.

is The North Carolina Roots of~frican American Literature
and includes writing from slave narratives to early 20th-
century literature. Like Williams, Andrews placed literacy at the center of these stories. He described three
instances of"talking book" descriptions by narrators who
felt that they had witnessed "mystery" when a book
would "talk" to their master. Literacy gave a slave the
power to talk. Reading from the 1815 narrative,John
Jea, 171.e African American Preacher, Williams observed that,
barred from books,Jea saw himselfbarred from the
world. Repeatedly from the 1789 publication of The

Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa 171e African to the famous 1845
appearance of TI-le Life of Frederick Douglass, African-
Anlericans described a quest for empowerment that
placed literacy at its center.

Harris reminded the group that with or without
reading, the plantations were alive with an oral tradi-
tion that included folktales, an economic literacy that
taught about the unequal terms of African enslavement
in America, a medical literacy of herbs, birthing and care
for a vast range of illness, survival stories that illustrated
the rules for confronting the dangers in the slave
world, a literacy of cuisine, cooking both in the cabins
and in the fancy plantation kitchens, and even a literacy
of stories and sewing passed on through quilting.

But above all, Harris pointed out, reading and writ-
ing remained the keys to power. Moreover, once
em.powered, these men or women wrote in service of a